


All Things Yet To Come

by thedevilchicken



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drinking, Getting Back Together, Identity Porn, M/M, Redemption, Rough Sex, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 04:39:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15941969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Once they've defeated their enemies and retaken their home, Flint is at a loss for what comes next. Until he meets a man who bears a striking resemblance to someone he once knew.





	All Things Yet To Come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [enviropony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enviropony/gifts).



> Written for the AU request: "Flint succeeds in starting a revolution and defeating Britain - now what"!

Once they'd won, there was nothing left for Flint to fight for. So, he drank instead. 

He drank while the others squabbled about who should have what, and why, and when. He didn't pretend to feign interest in how Teach and Silver and their respective men went about their confrontations; he had no true opinion on the matter because, in the end, when he searched what remained of his soul, he found he hadn't expected victory. He'd expected death and frankly, he might even have believed that they'd deserved it. It would have been an end to it, at least. 

He drank at a table in the tavern, in the town where Max ruled now that Eleanor was gone. He could not convince himself that she might like him and so he had to wonder if her generous provisioning of room and board and all the rum he could drink, all completely free of charge, was her way of hastening his demise, whether timely or otherwise. He caught her watching him from time to time with a look in her eyes too hard to be pity, and he'd raise his glass and she'd raise hers in return. She didn't like him, of that much he was at least moderately certain, but while Teach and Silver argued, Max was Queen of Nassau. The things he'd done had put her there, though more by accident than by design, and he wondered, as the weeks passed and her distant cordiality toward him did not diminish, if perhaps he'd been wrong; perhaps she did what she did to thank him. 

He drank alone; just a handful of men still remained there in Nassau who dared brave his ill humour, and they weren't presently on amicable terms. He was there day and night for weeks on end, slumped at the same splintered table as if the answers to all his unasked questions lay at the bottom of his next empty glass, if not at the bottom of the sea. He couldn't find it in himself to call his state either sad or angry, or indeed much of any other thing at all - he felt a kind of blankness in the places where there had once been such consuming wrath. He was tired, he supposed, when he'd been meant to feel triumphant. They'd won. He'd brought them to it. He just hadn't thought much past that, or at all, and was neither content nor discontent that they carried on without him. 

He took a walk under the stars one night, drunk but not yet drunk enough to sleep. He sat himself down on a convenient doorstep and he looked up into the sky - sometimes all he saw there was his midshipman's training, the stars just signs by which they might navigate the seas, but that night the Royal Navy seemed so very far behind him. What he saw instead were the faces of the people that he'd lost - Gates, Miranda, and then Thomas when he searched for him. He saw them looking down, and he couldn't think that they'd be proud of what they saw. He was a very different man than had set out from England. He was a very different man than had been buoyed by Thomas Hamilton's noble ideology.

He looked away again and, for a moment, through damp eyes, he thought he saw a face he knew there in the street. With a great leap of his heart, he thought he saw Thomas, but once he'd rubbed his eyes clear and pulled himself upright, there was no longer any sign of him. The truth of it ached, but he understood: he'd seen what he'd wanted to see, and the bottle sang its siren song again. 

In the afternoon sun the following day, his mind played tricks again. In the marketplace, among the merchants and their patrons, he thought he caught a glimpse of the man that he'd once known, alive and well. He followed him, as best he could - he skirted stalls and tables, nudging past the myriad people who were in his way, searching for him, almost frantic, catching only flashes of blonde hair and skin more tanned from the Nassau sun than he'd ever known it be in London. When he finally admitted that he'd lost the trail completely, if he'd ever had it, he told himself it must have been some other man who bore a cursory resemblance, or else it was that he was going mad. Neither thing would have come to him as a surprise. 

He thought he saw him again the following day, and again the day after, then again, and again, crossing streets and turning corners, always out of reach. He wanted to call out to him but, one night in his bed in his room in Max's brothel, he understood he daren't. He wasn't certain which of the possible outcomes might be worse: it being someone else, or nobody at all, or it truly being him. 

Six weeks after they'd taken Nassau and then held it against the forces of Spain and England, Flint stood up from his table and he stumbled, and he fell toward the floor. A man stepped in to catch him, to pull him up again and set him right, and as Flint cursed under his breath, he looked up and he saw Thomas. He was older, yes, and tanned and worn - his hands were not a lord's, but Flint was almost sure he knew him anyway. But there was no hint of recognition on his face. 

"Thomas," he said, with his heart racing hard. 

"'Fraid not," the man replied, with a pleasant smile, and it was almost Thomas's voice if not his accent with it. "You watch your step now, Captain," he said, and then he turned to walk away. Flint watched him go, with something twisting like a blade inside his chest. It was Thomas but it wasn't. 

"Who was that man?" he asked two sailors at a nearby table, who shrugged and eyed him oddly. "Do you know him?" he asked another man nearby, another drunk, whose blank look said he didn't. 

"His name is Fenton," Max said. She took him by surprise and he turned too quickly to look at her, making the room spin all around him. "He arrived here with Woodes Rogers. He was offered passage home to England. He declined." She paused long enough to pour him out another drink and then look up at him, wide-eyed but not remotely innocent. "I think you know him."

"He reminds me..." He frowned and shook his head and rubbed his neck. He took a moment to remind himself of where he was and who he was there with, then began again with a quirk of his brow. "If his name is Fenton, we have never met," he said, and he took the drink and raised it. "You'll excuse me, Max. I'm very drunk."

"Yes, I think you are," she replied, like she didn't quite think he was drunk enough. "And here we all have ghosts in our pasts." 

He inclined his head in agreement, and she eyed him, all black kohl and curls, just a moment longer before she walked away. 

In the morning, he almost didn't look for Fenton. He almost left the mystery unsolved in case he found he didn't like the answer, but he dragged himself from bed when the sun was already up quite high and he washed himself over a bowl of once-hot water that had long since gone quite cold. He dressed and he left the brothel just as the earliest patrons were strolling in. He asked the girls if they knew a man named Fenton - the few he met on his way to the doors hadn't heard the name, they said. He asked one of his old crewmen, now Silver's, who was likewise uninformed. He asked a few others in the street, whose faces he knew, but it wasn't till he stumbled across Jack Rackham that he found his answer. 

" _Robert_ Fenton?" Rackham asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. He seemed to be as worse for wear for last night's drink as Flint was himself. "Roughly so high, fair hair, rather excellent posture?" Flint gave a sharp nod. "He was the governor's bookkeeper. When he made the rather unlikely decision to stay in Nassau, Teach and Silver asked him to manage the accounts. It seemed to be the one thing they agreed on." 

"They trust him?" Flint asked.

"More than they trust each other, at least."

Flint was well aware that did not exactly speak volumes of their faith in him, knowing as he did their feeling about one another. And he nodded again before he left him there, at the tailor's where he'd found him. 

When he saw Fenton that night in the tavern, drinking with Billy and one of Teach's men, Flint tried to pretend he wasn't studying him. He seemed so familiar, sitting there, but in the low light it was difficult to tell - perhaps he wanted so badly for Robert Fenton to be Thomas Hamilton that his drink-addled mind in the warm lamplight had made it so, and so he watched for signs of recognition there that never came. He didn't once glance in Flint's direction, not till Flint stood up to leave and Fenton's gaze was drawn. Flint hurried out before a word was said, feeling the sting of his own cowardice acutely. He resolved to rectify his mistake presently. 

He waited, swigging from the bottle that he'd left with, loitering in the dark beside the tavern until he saw Fenton leave, alone. He grabbed him from behind, bottle discarded with a wet thump against the ground, one hand clamped down over his mouth so that he couldn't make a sound, and he dragged him away. He pushed him to the wall in the dark, empty alleyway beside the tavern. 

"Who are you?" he asked, almost hissing, and as he moved his hand away, he said, "Don't call out. Don't."

"Fenton," he replied. "I'm Robert Fenton. What do you want? I have very little money."

Flint scowled. "I don't want your money," he replied. 

"Do you mean to kill me, then? I know your reputation, Captain."

"No."

"Then what?"

The question struck him, because he knew he didn't know. It unsettled him. The fabric under his fingers felt stiff and starched and rough. Fenton's skin was flushed and Flint's pulse raced and his head spun.

Flint kissed him. He pressed his hard, rum-stained mouth to Fenton's and, for a moment, Fenton froze. Flint stopped. He stepped back, almost tripped, felt he deserved that and worse, and Fenton, wide-eyed, just said, "Oh."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Oh," Fenton said again, but the expression on his face had changed from one of shock to understanding. "Oh, I see," he said, with his gaze on Flint, as if he saw him then in an entirely new and different light. He stepped forward. He stepped closer. Flint stepped back, disarmed, with rising panic. 

"You see nothing," he said. "I've had too much to drink. I apologise, Mr Fenton. I will find my way to bed." But he didn't move. Neither did Fenton.

"I believe you might like it if I found my way there with you, Captain."

"You're wrong."

"Am I?" 

Fenton moved closer still. He cupped Flint's prickly jaw in both his hands except then one dipped down to squeeze firmly in between his thighs and Flint reacted, suddenly, violently, shoving him away back up against the wall. Fenton just smiled placidly. 

"We don't need a bed, I suppose," he said, blithely. He glanced around the barely moonlit alley, full of discarded crates and sacks and broken bottles, rotting leftovers set out for the dogs. "Here will be as good as anywhere. Should I bend over or do you prefer I bugger you instead?"

Flint hit him before he'd even known he'd wanted to, in a flash of anger so hot it made him burn inside. Fenton hissed a breath in through his teeth and spat blood out into the dirt. 

"You like it rough, then?" Fenton pulled himself up tall, to the full extent of his quite impressive height. He seemed a little broader through the shoulders than he recalled Thomas had been. His face was more worn, tanned and lined where Thomas had been smoother, and perhaps his mouth hadn't curved quite like that, perhaps his nose had been a little straighter, his forehead higher, his chin stronger. He couldn't tell and his head swam with blind rage and with uncertainty and with a kind of shame he hadn't felt in years, knowing that even if it wasn't Thomas, he wanted it. Viscerally. Hotly. Till his hands itched to touch and he set his jaw tightly to keep from cursing. He wanted it. He wanted _him_. 

He pushed Fenton back against the wall again, his advantage in height proving no real advantage at all. He followed him in, pressed him there against the mix of wood and brick, scraped his teeth against his neck, because shame be damned in the face of his anger. He was angry with himself for starting this and with Fenton for not stopping him. He was angry with himself for wanting it and with Fenton for seeing that so clearly in him. He bit at Fenton's jaw. He ground his cock against Fenton's hip, regrettably still inside his trousers. He squeezed at Fenton's crotch, finding him hard under his hand and wanting it and not. When they kissed again, rough and bright with the faint remaining tang of Fenton's blood, he knew he mostly hated him because he wasn't Thomas Hamilton. 

He shoved his own trousers down over his hips. He fumbled at Fenton's belt at the same time that Fenton did, their hands in each other's way until their cocks were free and Flint stroked them together, hot skin on skin, with a low groan against Fenton's neck that he didn't try to contain. A few rough strokes and that was all it took for his hips to buck and his free fingers to go tight in Fenton's short, near-familiar hair. Then he stumbled back and he rearranged his clothes to something more like order and he tried not to look as Fenton stroked himself, unsatisfied as Flint had left him - his trousers were down to mid-thigh and his shirt rucked up underneath his arms and Flint stared at him, wide-eyed, shaken, thoroughly appalled, as Fenton gasped and came over his own hand. 

Fenton's eyes were on him, watching him watch. Flint felt sick. Then Flint fled. Frankly, he wasn't sure what else to do.

He saw him again the next night, eating with Teach and Silver before the two of them went into Max's room. Fenton looked at him across the dimly lit room, and then he stood with his tankard in his hand like he might decide to join him though no one else but Max had ever actually dared, and even she had had the sense to keep her silence. Flint rose himself and left before he could discover Fenton's true intentions, afraid as he was of what they might have been, and what he might have done in turn. When he returned to his room, he locked the door just in case and he shuttered all the windows. He blew out the light and in bed, boots off, shirt discarded, stripped down to his skin against the sheets, he told himself he didn't think of Robert Fenton when he took himself in hand. He didn't even think of Thomas Hamilton. 

He saw him again the next night, too, and the night after that, until he began to drink at a table in the brothel instead of at the tavern, just so he could avoid him, though he could not avoid his own hot remorse. The truth was, though, he didn't want to - he wanted to see his familiar face and feel his familiar hands, kiss his familiar mouth and pretend, even if it wasn't so, because it couldn't be so, that Thomas was there with him, so far away from where they'd been before. And so, the fourth night or the fifth, perhaps the sixth since nights had all begun to blur together with the application of a cup of rum, he waited for him again, outside the tavern, before dawn. 

They didn't speak a word, nor did Flint wish them to. Each word that Fenton might have said would make it clearer who he failed to be and Flint wished only to pretend, except he found he couldn't. He sank to his knees in the dirt and he sucked him till he came like that, fingers raking at the short red hair growing in over Flint's once close-shorn scalp. Flint spat and wiped his mouth against his palm and he jerked himself roughly, still on his knees, with his head hanging. Fenton watched him. Flint's cheeks burned red with lust and shame. And when Fenton tried to touch him, Flint reeled, and struck his face, and fled instead. 

The next night, Fenton's eye was bruised, but it didn't seem to bother him as they kissed and swore and struggled, fingers in each other's clothes. There was a scrape at his cheekbone the next night from a glancing contact with the wall, and Flint pressed his thumb there, then his mouth, while Fenton pushed his trousers down. The next night, a cut at his chin was just beginning to heal. The next, his lower lip was split. Flint looked no better than that himself. It seemed to fit, if nothing else did.

And them, one night, Flint went back to the tavern. Two men left his table as he entered, with a nod. Just a few minutes later, Fenton sat down. Flint didn't look at him; he just offered him the bottle with a hard, half-warning glance. 

They left together, at some point in the hours shortly before dawn. Flint didn't ask him to follow him but he didn't keep him from it, either. When he took the back staircase to his room, he could hear the lurid moans from patrons there along the way and though they'd never bothered him before, somehow they almost made him angry, and they definitely made him blush. Perhaps it was the fact he wasn't alone as he usually was, or that the only time that Max's girls had visited him had been to bring him food and drink, or frankly check he hadn't died. As they went into the room, he thought perhaps it was less those sounds and more because he didn't want to share the way he lived, not with this man he wanted to be Thomas. This brothel room strewn with emptied glasses that the servants had yet to dare to take away was as low a place as he had ever been. He'd never felt himself entirely Thomas's equal, if he told the truth, but he'd tried so very hard to have him find him worthy. What he'd sunk to was hardly that.

"Who was he?" Fenton asked, as they stood together in Flint's room that was so very devoid of anything truly _him_ at all, or perhaps the sticky residue of spilled rum and the cloying sweet smell of it on the too-close air was what was truly his these days. 

"Who was who?" Flint asked, feigning ignorance quite poorly. He glanced in Fenton's direction with a sinking, roiling feeling in his stomach at that question, as he took off his coat. His feigned nonchalance could have been no more convincing. 

"Thomas." Fenton removed his own coat, which was a rather far cry from any of Thomas's old finery, not that any man in Nassau had had that. "You called me Thomas one nigh, as if you knew me."

Flint sighed. He sat down wearily, on the end of the ridiculous four poster bed, and rested there forearms to knees. 

"A good man," he replied, tersely, tiredly, which he knew was true if incomplete.

"Your lover."

He raised his brows. He looked at him. "Yes," he said, though he barely meant to. He supposed, however, that the secrets he'd kept no longer mattered.

"He looked like me."

"Yes." Flint frowned. He shrugged. "Or else I've convinced myself he did." 

"Where is he?"

Flint smiled a small, not quite pained smile. "He died," he said. "A long time ago. Because of me." 

"Because of what you did together.

"Yes."

"You could pretend I'm him."

"I don't--"

"Just tell me what to do."

Flint paused. He looked at him, excited and sick, half drunk, exhausted. He looked at him, standing there in the odd combination of lamplight and moonlight, which almost made him look like he wasn't really there at all. His secrets didn't matter. They'd won. And he was tired, so tired, but the least that he could say was Robert Fenton had made him feel something. Perhaps there was more he could take from that.

"Your accent's wrong," he said, sharply. He sat up straight as his heart hammered almost nervously. "You're the son of a lord, man, not a dockside fishmonger."

"A lord indeed," Fenton replied, with a hint of a smile at Flint's changed demeanour, and he took a moment to crack his neck before he pulled himself up straight and tall. He tucked one hand in behind his back as the other rested on the dining chair in front of him. It should have struck Flint as a poor caricature of the man he'd known but the effect, when Fenton looked at him and said, "What do you think? Is this better?" was a striking one. Flint just nodded, rubbing his mouth with one palm that he then swiped over his beard and down his neck as if to steady himself. 

"What should I do now?" Fenton asked. "I'm yours to command, Captain."

Flint bit at his knuckle then sat up, hands to thighs. "Take off your clothes," he said, and Fenton obliged him, untying the neckcloth at his throat and draping it over the back of the chair, unbuttoning his shirt. He undressed not quite slowly but unhurried, pulling off boots and breeches and underclothes and folding them and setting them aside on a patch of tabletop as yet untouched by sticky spilled liquor. He stripped himself naked and stood there barefoot on the bare wooden floorboards, his body not like Flint remembered Thomas's but that could be, should he have wanted it to, just put down to time. 

Flint looked at him, standing naked, unashamed of his nascent erection just the way that Thomas might once have been. He could pretend, he told himself, just once - where was the harm in that? - and so he rose. He could have this, if he let himself.

"Turn around," he said, so Fenton did, and Flint stepped close. He settled his hands at Fenton's bare hips and rested his forehead down between his shoulder blades. Then he moved closer still, pressed his chest to Fenton's back and wrapped his arms around his waist. Fenton rested his hands on Flint's. Flint closed his eyes. 

"What did I call you?" Fenton asked. "It can't have been _Flint_."

"James," he replied, in one final disregard of secrecy and danger. 

"James," Fenton echoed, in that voice so like the one he'd known, the accent almost perfect. His fingers circled Flint's wrists. "Did you love me, James?"

"I still do," he replied, his tone perhaps a fraction wry, as his lips moved against the back of Fenton's shoulder. "Help me undress?"

Fenton turned and Flint released him. Fenton smiled and said, "Of course," and he went down on his knees to start with Flint's worn leather boots. He felt he ought to make him stop but couldn't as he bared Flint's skin and pressed his mouth to it, one calf, one thigh, a hip, a wrist, one collarbone, his forehead, then the corner of his lips. They were naked together in the odd, low light, Fenton's hands at his waist, his cock nudging his hip, and he should have stopped and sent him away but it was so easy to pretend, so much easier than he'd believed it ever could be. 

He went to the bed. He lay down on his back and Fenton followed, moving over him, slowly but surely as if dealing with a skittish horse and not a dirty fucking pirate. Flint parted his knees and Fenton settled between them, Flint's thighs cradling his hips against him. So close together, face to face, it really could have been Thomas. When Fenton kissed him, when he leaned away to search through a box of Max's girls' discarded paraphernalia that sat on the table by the bed, when his slick fingers touched him, when Flint turned onto his hands and knees and Fenton pushed inside him in hitching fits and starts, he very nearly believed it was true. What they did felt the same. When he closed his eyes, it might have been London on a summer's night and not just the fetid air of Nassau. 

They lay together after, their sweat-damp skin barely cooling in the close night air, Fenton's fingertips tracing Flint's old scars, and his prickly jaw, and the curve of his lips. It felt intimate. It was a luxury he should not have indulged, except he told himself _just once_.

"You know, they need a leader," Fenton said, almost conversational about his sudden change of subject, and Flint's eyes opened far enough to frown at him. Fenton turned away and left the bed and walked away to the table where a half-empty bottle sat amidst a sea of dirty glasses. Fenton chose what was perhaps the only clean one that remained and poured himself a drink. Then he sat down, still naked, quite natural, quite easy, as Flint watched him across the room. 

"I thought it might be my task when I came here, but I've come to see it's yours," he said, with a faint quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth. He took a sip from the glass and winced at its contents. "Or perhaps it would be if you weren't awash with rum." He set the glass back down on the table and he raised his brows at he tapped its rim with one fingertip. "I know you're a sailor, James, but really."

Flint sat up, frowning, almost scowling. "Stop," he said. "I don't find this amusing." 

"Nor do I." Fenton sat back. Both the lamp and the moon were behind him, shadowing his face, but Flint could see what he needed to see. His stomach sank. His chest clenched. "You brought them this far, James. Their squabbling achieves nothing." 

"Stop," Flint said again. He left the bed and eyed him venomously, sidelong, as he stalked away across the room. 

"I won't, not when we had such grand plans." He dipped one fingertip in the rum and licked it clean with a casual wrinkling of his nose. "Those plans may have altered since, but I won't see you abandon them."

"I said stop." Flint took his sword and in a second, the tip was scraping Fenton's throat, fetching up a thin line of blood just by his Adam's apple. 

"Do you mean to kill me, then?" Fenton asked, calmly. He stood, guiding the blade up with him, the flat of it against his palm. "Is that the kind of man I loved, who would take my life because I spoke a truth he didn't wish to hear?"

"Who are you?"

"You've known that all along, though you didn't seem to want to."

"I don't--"

"I'm Thomas," he said, spreading his arms wide with a jarring kind of grace. "Thomas _Robert Fenton_ Hamilton, but that was always something of a mouthful." He smiled wryly. "You called me Thomas, once I persuaded you to. I called you James, even when you were in uniform."

"You died."

"I was sent away. I escaped." He raised his brows. "I found you."

"I'm not the same man you knew." 

"I thought that, too, at first. When I saw this. Who you'd become." 

"I don't understand."

Thomas guided the sword from his throat. He eased it from Flint's white-knuckled grip and discarded it on the tabletop, in a thunk of metal against wood and a clink of metal against glass. He rested his hands warm and solid at Flint's shoulders. 

"You were always this man, James. And I loved him then, as I do now."

"Miranda..."

"I know." 

"And the things I've done!"

"I understand," Thomas said, and the look on his face said he believed he did. "But you've started something here. Not what we designed, but there's worth in it." His hands went to Flint's jaw. He held his gaze. "Now see it through." 

Flint swallowed past the knot in his throat. He took a breath. He nodded. Thomas Hamilton had always known exactly how to make his point, and _when_ to make it, for its maximum effect. And, shortly after, they returned to bed; they spoke no more, not that night, but Flint knew words would come.

In the morning, Captain Flint walked into the negotiations, sober and clear-headed. Perhaps Teach and Silver didn't like the things he said, but they listened to him in spite of that. 

In the evening, James McGraw walked into the bedroom, filled with an anxious species of anticipation. Thomas was there waiting at the table, with a warm smile that he readily returned. The expression felt odd on his worn face, but he hoped to recover the habit.

For the first time then, as they shared a smile and shared a meal that he hoped would be the first of many, Flint could see past victory. He saw into a future filled with hardships but with promise, too. 

As Thomas's hand covered his against the tabletop, as Thomas's mouth met the hinge of his freshly shaved jaw, he understood: they had a long way to go, and obstacles to overcome, but their ways still lay together.


End file.
